Homecomings (41 page)

Up to the sixties he had lived the life of a young man. His pleasures had been a young man’s, even his minor ones, his games and his marathon walks. He looked more delicate than most men, but there was a pagan innocence about him, he had not been compelled to adjust himself to getting old. Then it had happened at a blow.

He was out of comparison more stoical than Mr Knight. Though Davidson believed that when he died he was going into oblivion, he feared death less than the old clergyman. He had found life physically delightful until he was sixty-five, while Mr Knight had immobilized himself in hypochondria more than twenty years before. But of the two it was Davidson who had no consolation in the face of a sick old age.

What he did was concentrate fanatically on any of his pastimes still within his power. No one could strike another spark of interest out of him; that Saturday afternoon Margaret was screwing herself up to try.

As we entered his study with the children, he was playing the war game against Helen, the board spread out on a table so that he could be comfortable in an armchair. In the quiet both boys backed shyly to Margaret, and momentarily the only noise we heard was Davidson’s breathing, a little shorter, a little more strenuous than a healthy man’s, just audible on the close air.

The silence cracked as Maurice went straight to Helen, to whom he talked more fluently than any other adult, while the little boy advanced and stared from the board to Davidson. While Helen took Maurice away into the corner, Charles asked: ‘What is Grandpa doing?’

‘Nothing very dazzling, Carlo.’

Although Davidson’s voice had none of the spring and tone it used to have, although the words were mysterious to him, the child burbled with laughter: being called ‘Carlo’ made him laugh as though he were being tickled. He cried out that his grandfather called him Carlo, he wanted the joke repeated. Then Davidson coughed and the child looked at him, transparent indigo irises turned upon opaque sepia ones, the old man’s face sculptured, the child’s immediate and aware, so unlike that they seemed not to have a gene in common.

‘Are you better?’ the child asked.

‘Not really. Thank you,’ Davidson replied.

‘Not quite better?’

‘No, not quite better.’

‘A little better?’

For once not replying with the exact truth, Davidson said: ‘Perhaps a little better.’

‘Better soon,’ said the child, and added, irrelevantly and cheerfully: ‘Nanny is a little better.’ It was true that the nurse who came in half the week had been ill with influenza.

‘I’m very glad to hear that, Carlo.’

I wanted to distract the child from his grandfather. I could hear – beneath Davidson’s tone, off-hand rather than polite, which he used to the infant not yet three as to a Nobel Prize winner – I could hear a discomfort which by definition, as Davidson himself might say, was beyond help. So I asked the little boy to come and talk to me instead.

He replied that he would like to talk to his grandfather. I said that I would show him pictures. He smiled but said: ‘Grandpa called me Carlo.’

He went round the board, nearer to Davidson, staring applaudingly into his face. Then Margaret spoke to Charles, explaining that he could come back later and that I had splendid new pictures for him.

‘Go with daddy,’ she told him.

The child gazed at me, his eyes darkened almost to black.

As a rule he was amenable, but he was enjoying the clash of wills. He was searching for words, there was a glint in his eye which in an adult one would have suspected as merry, obstinate, perceptibly sadic.

‘Go with daddy,’ Margaret said.

Clearly and thoughtfully he replied: ‘I don’t know who daddy is.’

Everyone laughed, me included: for the instant I was as hurt as I had been at eighteen, asking a girl to dance and being turned down. Then I was thinking how implacable one’s egotism is, thinking from mine just wounded to this child’s.

Gazing at him beside his grandfather’s chessboard, I felt unusual confidence, without any premonition, that, as he grew up, he would be good-natured: within the human limits, he would be amiable and think of others. But one had to learn one’s affections: the amiability and gentleness one dressed up in, but the rapacious egotism had been there all the time beneath. It protruded again, naked as in infancy, as one got into old age. Looking from the smiling little boy to his grandfather, dispirited and indrawn, I thought that by a wretched irony we were seeing its re-emergence in that man, so stoical and high-principled, who only a year before had been scarcely middle-aged.

As we tried to persuade the child away from his grandfather’s side, he was bad-tempered in a manner uncommon with him. He cried, he was fractious, he said he had a cough like grandpa, he practised it, while Margaret listened, not knowing how much was genuine, except that he had woken up with the faint signs of a cold that morning.

She put her hand to his forehead, and so did I. He seemed just warm with passion. Through anger, he kept telling us he would like to stay with grandpa: he repeated, as though it were a reason for staying, that he had a cough like grandpa, and produced it again.

‘I think he’s over-excited, I don’t think it can be more than that,’ said Margaret to me in an undertone, hesitating whether to look after him or her father, her forehead lined. Then she made up her mind; she had come to speak to her father, she could not shirk it and leave him with his spirits dead. She called to Helen, telling her that Charles was upset, would she take care of him for half an hour? Helen nodded, and got up. It was curious to see her, trim yet maternally accomplished as Margaret would never be, since Helen’s instinct was so sure that it left her no room for wondering whether she might not be taking the wrong course, saying the wrong thing. As effortlessly as a hypnotist, she led him and Maurice out of the room, other attractions wiped out of Charles’ mind as though his memory were cut off.

Left with her father, Margaret’s first act was to take Helen’s side of the war game, at which she was the only person who could give Davidson a run. In silence, they finished the game. Davidson’s expression had lightened a little: partly it was that Margaret was his favourite daughter, partly the anodyne of the game – but also, where many men would have drawn comfort from their grandchildren, to him the sight of them seemed a reminder of mortality.

He and Margaret were staring down at the board: his profile confronted hers, each of them firm and beautiful in their ectomorphic lines, their diagonals the mirror-image of each other. He had a winning position, but she contrived to make the end respectable.

‘For neatness,’ said Davidson, his tone lively again, ‘I give that finish 65 out of a 100.’

‘Nothing like enough,’ said Margaret. ‘I want 75 at least.’

‘I’m prepared to compromise on 69.’

He sounded revivified. He looked at the clock and said eagerly: ‘If we’re quick, there’s time for another one.’

Reluctantly Margaret said no, they’d better leave it till next week, and his face went heavy, as though the skin were at last bagging out over the architecture of the bones. Afterwards, she had to ask him questions to keep him from sinking numb into his thoughts. His replies were uninterested and dull. Were there any pictures we ought to see? One exhibition, he said flatly, was possibly worth our time. When would he be able to go himself? Not yet. When? Margaret asked. They said – his reply was indifferent – that in a month or two he might be able to take a taxi and then walk through a couple of rooms. You must do that as soon as you can, she said. He hadn’t the slightest inclination to, he said.

She understood that she was on the wrong tack. He had said all he had to say about pictures when he was well; he had written about them at the height of his powers; he could do so no more, and it was better to cut it out absolutely, not to taunt himself by seeing a picture again.

Casting about, she mentioned the general election of the past winter, and then the one she thought must soon follow.

‘I should have thought,’ said Davidson, ‘that one had to be a morbidly good citizen to find the prospect beguiling.’

‘I don’t think anyone does,’ said Margaret.

‘I should have thought that it would lack picturesque features to a remarkable extent.’ He was making an effort to keep up the conversation now.

‘No,’ he added, ‘there would be one mildly picturesque feature as far as I’m concerned. That is, if I had the strength to get as far as voting, which I must say seems improbable. But if I did manage to vote, I should be voting Conservative for the first time in my life.’

I was thinking how most of those I knew, certainly eight out of ten of my professional acquaintances, were moving to the right.

Margaret, taking advantage of the chance with Davidson, broke in.

‘Going back to your voting,’ she said, ‘it would have seemed incredible thirty years ago, wouldn’t it?’

‘Quite incredible,’ he replied.

‘You and your friends didn’t have much idea of the way things would actually go, did you?’

‘By and large,’ he said, ‘they’ve gone worse than we could possibly have imagined.

‘Thirty years ago,’ he added, ‘it looked as though they would turn out sensibly.’

‘If you had your time again,’ she said, ‘how would you change what you were all thinking?’

‘In my present form,’ he was not speaking dully now, she had stung him, ‘the thought of having one’s time over again is fairly near the bone.’

‘I know it,’ she said: her tone was as sharp. ‘That’s why you’ve got to tell us. That’s why you’ve got to write it down.’

‘I don’t trust the views of a man who’s effectively done for.’

‘For some things,’ she said, throwing all gentleness away, ‘they’re the only views one can trust.’

She went on: ‘You know very well, I’ve never much liked what your friends stand for. I think on all major issues you’ve been wrong. But don’t you see how valuable it would be to see what you think–’

‘Since the future doesn’t interest me any more.’ They were each being stark; she was tired with the effort to reach him, she could not go much farther, but his eyes were shining with interest, with a kind of fun.

‘On most major issues,’ he caught her phrase, ‘we were pretty well right.’ He gazed at her. After a pause he said: ‘It might be worth thinking about.’

Another pause, in which we could hear his breathing. His head was bent down, but in his familiar posture, not in dejection.

‘It might give me something to think about,’ he said.

With a sigh, she said that now she must go and find the children.

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Davidson. ‘Mind you, I can’t promise. It’d be a bit of a tax physically and I don’t suppose I’m up to it.’

He said goodbye to me, and then turned to Margaret.

‘I’m always very glad to see you,’ he said to her. It was a curious parting from his favourite daughter: it seemed possible that he was not thinking of her as his daughter, but as the only person who looked straight at him in his illness and was not frightened off.

We went into the drawing-room, where I had not been since the evening Margaret said she would come to me. In the summer afternoon, with Helen and the children playing on the floor, it seemed much smaller, as diminished as one of childhood’s rooms revisited.

In the contracted room, Helen was saying that Charles did seem a little out of sorts: perhaps we ought to take him home soon. The child, picking up most of the conversation, cried because he did not want to go; he cried again, in inexplicable bursts, in the taxi; in the nursery his cheeks were flushed, he laughed with a hysterical echo, but was asking, with a customary reasonableness, where Auntie Helen was and when he would see her again. Then he said, with a puzzled and complaining expression: ‘My feet hurt.’

There seemed nothing wrong with his feet, until Maurice said that he meant they were cold, and Margaret rubbed them between her hands.

‘Clever boy,’ Margaret said to Maurice, already ambivalent about being praised.

‘Shall we clap him?’ said Charles, but his laughter again got out of control. He cried, became quiet, and then, with a return of the complaining expression, said: ‘My head hurts.’

Under our eyes his cold was growing worse. His nose ran, he coughed, his temperature was a little up. Without speaking to each other, Margaret and I were thinking of his nurse’s influenza. At once, no worry in her voice, Margaret was arranging for Maurice to sleep in the spare room: still not hurrying, as though she were ticking off her tasks, she had a word with me alone before she put Charles to bed.

‘You are not to be too anxious,’ she said.

Her face, like many whose nerves are near the surface, was always difficult to read, far more so than the poker faces of Rose or Lufkin, because it changed so quickly. Now it was as calm as when she spoke to the children. Yet, though she was steady, and I was letting my anxiety go, I suddenly knew that for no reason – not because of any of his symptoms, nor anything she knew or noticed which I had not – her anxiety was deeper.

‘If he’s not better tomorrow, we’ll have Charles March in straightaway,’ I said.

‘Just to give you a decent night,’ she said, ‘perhaps we might as well have him in now.’

Charles March had arrived and was in the nursery before Margaret had finished putting the child to bed. Standing in the drawing-room I listened to their voices, insistent, incomprehensible, more ominous than if I could have picked out the words, just as their voices had been when I listened in this same room, the morning before he was born. It seemed longer than on that morning until they came to join me, but at once Charles gave me a kind, protective smile.

‘I don’t think it’s anything very terrible,’ he said.

Just for an instant I felt total reassurance, like that of a jealous man who has had the moment’s pretext for jealousy wiped away.

He sat down and, his eyes sharp and cautious, asked me about the nurse’s flu. What was it like? More catarrhal than usual? Had any of us had it? Yes, Margaret replied, she had, mildly: it had been going round the neighbourhood.

‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘several of my patients have had it.’